In the 11th year of her increasingly unfulfilling marriage to Mark*, Nicole began an affair with a co-worker. Although she thought Will was a fun, worldly person, Nicole’s initial impulse was simply to see if her marital sex life was bad because “there was something wrong with me.” Her affair with Will answered that question with a resounding “no.” “I felt happy, and I thought I deserved to be happy a little bit,” she says. “It distracted me from everything else. Then I developed a real dependency on Will. He was always on my mind.” These obsessive thoughts made it particularly difficult for Nicole to keep her secret from Mark, the person she spoke to most. “I couldn’t tell Mark the biggest thing that was happening to me—that I was forming this strong emotional connection with another person, and that I was feeling sexy and horny.” The fact that Nicole is, she says, “the least reserved person on the planet” made it even harder. “I would mention Will a lot, in the context of work situations. It was my way of sharing without sharing.
“I’ve always used self-disclosure as a way to connect with others, to get them to empathize with me. And because I’m not one to keep secrets, I went overboard. In the office, part of me wanted my coworkers to know I was Will’s ‘favorite.’ I dropped a lot of stories about him, even though it might have raised suspicion.”
A few months into the relationship, in a scene that seemed straight out of a TV series, Nicole discovered she was pregnant with Will’s child. Although she wanted another child, they decided under the circumstances (Will was also married) that this was unrealistic. “After I had an abortion I didn’t want, I had to go straight home to Mark and my kids and put on a happy face all evening. It was horrific. It was the worst moment of my life.” Nicole was now carrying a painful secret within a secret.
“Almost everyone carries a million secrets around with them,” says Barry Lubetkin, founder and director of the Institute for Behavioral Therapy. “They can be really silly, or they can be really important, like I constantly cheat on my taxes, or when I was 20 I assaulted someone and hurt them badly.” Deep secrets, Lubetkin says, are often traumatic events from the past, like a rape that made someone feel vulnerable or overwhelmed, or an obsession that they’re too ashamed to reveal. An illness or stigmatized identity (for example, being an illegal immigrant), an addiction, or a transgression like Nicole’s affair are other secrets Lubetkin says his clients keep. Deep secrets don’t have to be based on external events. The hopes and dreams that people don’t dare talk about out loud are also secrets. Self-esteem is often a person’s deepest secret, says clinical psychologist Nando Pelosi. “People tell me, ‘I look calm, but I’m always upset or stressed.’ That’s not a scam, it’s a facade.”
Deep secrets have an unsettling duality: Even if they’re not revealed, they can hurt us and those around us. We need to acknowledge our secrets internally to be true to ourselves, but they can make us feel inauthentic if they challenge our identity too deeply. We evolved to learn how to keep secrets, both as children who must become independent adults and as adults who must navigate a complex society. We also evolved to hide things from ourselves. The deepest secrets are the ones we don’t admit directly—even in our private diaries.
Necessity and Burden
Secrets draw an early boundary between self and caregiver. Until we first experience the concept of hiding information from mom and dad, around age 4, we assume they know everything. The secrets teens keep about their budding sexuality, their tangled social lives, and their emerging identities draw a thicker line between child and parent.
For teens and adults alike, shame underlies many secrets. We fear what people would think if they only knew. (The fact that nearly all of us have shameful secrets doesn’t alleviate that fear.) We keep secrets to avoid hurting others, too, even though withholding can be painful. Sometimes we keep secrets because we want to keep doing something that we know others would want us to stop doing if they found out.
Vigilant secret keepers pay the price. “A secret takes up so much of your mind that it interferes with work and romance because you always have to keep an eye on it so it doesn’t get out somehow,” Lubetkin says.
The more a secret takes up your mind, the more negative its effect. In an experiment conducted by Michael Slepian of Columbia University, participants were asked to think about a secret that preoccupied them, while others were asked to think about a secret that they didn’t think about very often. The former group then perceived the hill as steeper than the latter. The latter group felt “burdened,” in a way that clouded their judgment.
In another, Slepian interviewed gay men about whether they were out, then asked them to help him move boxes of books in his office (without mentioning that they were still under surveillance). Those who kept their identities private moved fewer boxes. Another group of participants who kept their secrets about their affair found household chores like carrying groceries more stressful than the control group.
Keeping a secret drains mental resources explains Salbian. If we feel exhausted, “other things in the world seem to require more effort. That reduces our motivation to do things.”
Some people—such as gay people who hide their sexual orientation—express a particular identity in their private lives, but not in the wider world. While this may seem preferable to living a complete lie, switching between the private and public selves is exhausting. The fear of appearing on the wrong stage for the wrong role is ubiquitous.
Given everything we know about the mind and body, it’s no surprise that such a heavy mental load can also affect physical health. Pioneering studies in the 1970s by James Pennebaker, of the University of Texas at Austin, found that people who had experienced traumatic sexual experiences as children or teenagers were more likely to develop health problems as they got older, especially if they kept the trauma hidden from others.
Since then, a series of studies have shown a link between keeping secrets and health: Keepers are more likely to suffer from headaches, nausea, and back pain, for example, and those who hide trauma are more likely to develop high blood pressure, influenza, and cancer. Pennebaker later discovered the power of writing about traumatic events and making sense of them. Students who did this in his lab for about 20 minutes each day, for a few days in a row, visited the health center far fewer times in the following months than students who wrote about a general topic or revealed a secret but didn’t delve into the feelings surrounding it.
But overwriting a secret can lead to rumination. “If you’re thinking about a secret in an unproductive way, one of the goals should be to not see it as an energy-draining problem but as a practical way to not disclose,” Pelosi says. In other words, we should move it from a hot or emotional truth to a more neutral area, like the everyday affairs we routinely keep private. “I don’t have to tell people my net worth, and I don’t have to suffer from not disclosing that fact,” he says.
Here’s the crucial question: Why did the secret take hold? A secret becomes an obsession when its context isn’t examined. “Secrets are usually a sign or a manifestation of an underlying set of circumstances,” Pelosi says. “If someone is experiencing shame or fear, it creates an internal market for secrets.”
Secrets often reflect beliefs about the self. A trauma-related secret might reflect suspicion that you’re incompetent, inadequate, or unacceptable. “If the assumptions are self-incriminating, it’s important to deconstruct the traumatic event,” Pelosi says. “Someone may always regret what happened, but if you look at it in a safe environment, like a therapist’s office, the trauma is lessened because it’s backed by secrecy, just as gunpowder needs a tighter tether to explode.”
In the case of hiding an addiction or compulsive behavior, the underlying premise may be a sense of helplessness: Since I can’t help this, I can’t share my secret because others will find out how weak I am. Or I can’t give up this habit. Or I can’t enjoy my life if others find out. “These beliefs can be paralyzing,” Pelosi says.
But looking closely and objectively at the secret allows you to reframe it. “You start to see it in a larger context,” Pelosi says. “You don’t ignore it. But it’s no longer a source of shame or hurt or a way to avoid contact with people.”
Secrets We Hide From Ourselves
It wasn’t that Leo* didn’t know he was in debt. “I knew the total on my three credit cards, but I didn’t want to know the exact number.” Even though his expenses were consistently higher than his income, a false sense of optimism washed over him each month. “I assumed the next month would be fine, thinking that one bill or another wouldn’t be as high and pushing the other expenses out of my mind. It was like my ability to calculate was clouded.”
One factor that kept him from confronting his mounting debt was fear. The magnitude of it seemed so overwhelming that Leo continued to rely on the belief that things were happening in his career and that a bigger paycheck was imminent. Then he could wipe it all away without having to make any real changes or sacrifices.
Shame was another factor. His girlfriend had hinted, but she would certainly think less of him if she knew the full story. “All my friends were moving forward, buying houses. I didn’t want to think of myself as different from them, as a loser.” So he tried not to think about it at all. “It created a low level of chronic stress, but it was also easy to live above that level.” One way, of course, was to keep spending. “I studied hard and worked hard, so I figured I needed indulgent breaks.” He lived like someone who had money, and therefore, he was someone who had money, right?
Years ago, Delroy Paulhus, of the University of British Columbia, devised deception scales to identify people who distorted their answers to self-report questionnaires. Two types of misrepresentation come into play: impression management, or conscious manipulation, where people customize an image of themselves for a target audience; and self-deception, or unconscious manipulation, where people believe false claims about themselves. Paulhus says both types are common.
Unknowingly lying about yourself in a survey may seem strange, but we are all stubborn self-deceivers in one way or another. Another. Evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers argues that our ability to self-deceive evolved as a way to help us deceive others—it’s easier to lie (and avoid falling for it) when you believe the lie. Consider a key evolutionary advantage to self-deception: An overconfident man is more likely to get the girl than a man who is honest about his flaws.
Common cognitive tricks to defend ourselves against emotional pain or conflict, which Leo uses, include denial, minimizing, and rationalizing away the problem. “Self-deception is a subtle distraction from solving the problem,” Pelosi says. “By not dealing with it, I can ignore it. It becomes a temporary way to feel better, but it’s not a permanent way.”
“If someone gets away with something for a long time, it loses its impact,” Lubetkin says. “It doesn’t occupy as much of their mind and doesn’t make them feel as guilty or anxious as it did before. Self-deception has convinced them that there’s no real crime to cover up.”
Sometimes, says Lubetkin, a patient suddenly sees an internal trick that has been fooling them for a long time, such as realizing that they want to love their family, even though for years they acted as if their relatives didn’t matter. “It’s not about a single secret per se, but about secret parts that they’ve never allowed themselves to know,” he says. “If you tell them about their self-deception, they’ll reject the idea, but if they figure it out themselves, it can be a great moment.”
Compartmentalization
Compartmentalization, or the ability to ignore a secret, a difficulty, or even a part of our personality while we move on with our lives, can be adaptive. Splitting one’s personality into compartments allows us to avoid dealing with contradictions head-on: You can be honest with person A, but shy and flirtatious with person B, and there’s no cognitive dissonance. Amid the endless urge to “be yourself” and “be authentic,” you might wonder if it’s secretive not to let all of your sides emerge at once. But dividing personality into compartments accommodates our different sources of motivation, says Brian Little, a professor at the University of Cambridge and author of Me, Myself, and Us. “When we take action in life, we suppress a whole host of other concerns, which you might say are masking them, but they’re not.” In Little’s concept of personality, one source of motivation is biological, or our basic temperament. Another is social, or the social and cultural norms and roles we adhere to. And a third is personal, the distinctive, personal issues, concerns, and projects we adhere to. Because the three sources can conflict, dividing personality into compartments enables us to move forward in different situations.
But if you constantly suppress your essential biological self, instead of occasionally acting out of character in the service of fulfilling a role or reaching a goal, your mental health will suffer, Little warns. Keeping your essential self on the shelf for too long can cause useful compartmentalization to slide into secrecy.
The most powerful form of self-deception, says Charles Raison of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is dissociation, which occurs on a spectrum. We’ve all gotten to a place without remembering how we got there. Then there are people whose “experience of the world is like Swiss cheese,” Raison says. “They go in and out, and if their personality isn’t tightly knit together, they may even begin to perceive themselves as more than one entity.” Almost all of these people have experienced trauma, Raison says.
Some will remember the event but forget the impact. “It’s a dissociation of emotion from narrative memory,” Raison says. The truth is that the facts aren’t a deep secret in such cases, but the mind has decided that the aftershocks were more than it could handle. Does recalling emotions make you a better person? “With this kind of secret, you can’t live life fully; the trauma shows up in other ways—as evidenced by the link between childhood trauma and adult obesity. But sometimes that’s better than a complete meltdown.”
DecisionToComeOut
“Sharing a secret is a candid way to get to the heart of the matter, which is how you feel about yourself and the world,” Pelosi says. His clients who confide in their secret often explode from the pressure to keep it secret and the emotions surrounding the hidden circumstances themselves. “Keeping a secret diminishes the ability of others to understand you and reinforces the idea that you have to go through something alone. That compounds the original dilemma.” That’s why therapists don’t judge clients, period. “They often judge themselves too harshly already. I see it as a problem that we have to work through collaboratively.”
Most patients report a sense of relief and gratitude, and some relief from sadness or anxiety, when they open up to someone they trust, Lubetkin says. “You don’t experience the shame of revealing yourself without telling people first. But remember, there is self-deception going on. Once the shield is down, you have to admit what you did.” You have to admit not only that you are an addict, for example, but that there is a reason for being an addict—a reason you left out in your journal.
University of Notre Dame psychologist Anita Kelly, author of The Psychology of Secrets, has come up with questions to ask yourself when considering disclosure, such as: Does the other person expect you to reveal this information? Have they asked you explicitly? Is the person you are considering confiding in a secret discreet and nonjudgmental? (Although you can send up “trial balloons” by commenting on the subject in general, it’s hard to assess who will stay silent. Close people tell two other people about a secret they’ve been told.) Is the person you’re keeping the secret from likely to find out? And finally, does the secret bother you, or can you live with it?
It’s hard to weigh the pain that sharing the secret might cause you or others against the pain of keeping it. If reframing the secret doesn’t work in your mind, you can open up to a therapist or a friend who isn’t connected to the secret in any way. They are more likely to accept your secret, continue to accept you, and perhaps offer a new perspective on the potential implications of sharing it more widely. If you conclude that the consequences of revealing are too unexpected or too negative, one way to deal with it is to focus on appreciating the life that has grown around your secret and to see the work of keeping it as a mandatory tax on that life.
If you can’t reveal a secret to even the most trusted person in your circle, because you don’t have the right to reveal it or the consequences will be worse than the relief it might bring, Slepian has found that sharing the secret anonymously online (via the Whisper app, for example) helps.
SecondarySecretKeeper
When someone entrusts you with a secret, it can certainly be a burden, especially if you have to hide it from mutual friends or relatives, forcing you to play the role of the deceiver. Once you tell someone, it becomes much easier to tell someone else, and then another, which is why setting a strict no-tell rule can help you protect someone’s secret. Taking pride in your ability to keep your word can help you get through the tempting moments. Yes, the other person has opened up to you about this dilemma, but in the process, they have strengthened the bond between you.
Secrets that are not based on shame, such as details of a new business venture, are easier to keep because there is honor in withholding information that, if revealed, might harm another person’s prospects or reputation.
Kelly believes that despite the popular advice to leave everything hanging, some secrets can be successfully kept and can cause a lot of harm if shared. Those who reveal themselves may start in negative ways. It’s easy to imagine that they become paranoid that others are reacting to them based on their exposed secret, leading them to distort their interpretations of interactions.
As much as deep secrets cause suffering for those who keep them, they also cause collateral damage to those who don’t know. “I had a patient who was hiding health information from his girlfriend,” says Lubetkin. “It wasn’t anything serious, but she knew he’d been to doctors, and because he was quiet, she convinced herself he had heart failure or some kind of incurable cancer.”
Although unintentional, making others question their sanity can be a disturbing consequence of keeping a secret. “I know something’s going on, and yet they deny it,” thinks a family member. “Am I stupid or unable to read situations? Am I completely crazy?” Letting your loved ones in on your secret can be upsetting or even burdensome, which is why resolving the underlying issue is often the best strategy for dealing with them properly.
Revealing
Secrets can come out without our explicit permission, says Lubetkin. “When there’s a lot of pressure on a person to keep it, the secret can seek release and drop at the most inopportune times.” If it’s not the secret itself, hints about its nature can leak out in Freudian slips. “A word or a touching gesture is the unconscious’s way of revealing it.”
Nicole continued her relationship with Will after her pregnancy brought them closer together. “Because I was emotionally distant from Mark, and he seemed to know nothing about me in general, I didn’t worry about being found out,” she says. “I didn’t take any precautions.”
Finally, the day came when Mark found a long string of messages between her and Will (open on her unlocked computer) that made it clear that they were in love. Mark’s grief gave way to relentless waves of anger. “For me, finding out was part crisis and part relief. I didn’t have to hide anything anymore,” she says. “For Mark, it was a disaster. But if he had never found out, he would still be in denial about our marriage. He never got another message about my grief.” (They’re still together and working on their marriage.)
For Leo, after telling his girlfriend about his financial troubles, it felt like an elephant had been lifted off his chest. “She was surprised, but she understood,” he says. She helped him come up with a plan to pay off the debt, and as he put it into action, he began to feel good about himself, “which was much better than avoiding bad feelings.”
Dealing with secrets requires the courage to face our biggest fears, discuss our beliefs, and perhaps release the pain, confusion, or even temporary chaos before stepping into a new reality. Your secret doesn’t have to define you. If you can come to terms with the events that shaped your secret behavior, or change whatever it is you’re hiding, it will regress into a calmer, smaller symbol of who you once were.
*Name changed
Secret Personality
Secrets aren’t always seen as toxic: In fact, it’s exciting to have exciting information that no one else has. You’ve succeeded in doing something or have power over those who don’t know, and maybe even those who normally have power over you. A secret can even provide comfort—a private sanctuary in one’s mind.
But some people are persistently secretive, and not to their detriment. People who score high on a scale measuring how likely they are to consciously keep secrets tend to have more health and psychological problems to begin with. Dale Larson, of Santa Clara University, conducted a meta-analysis and found that secretive people are more depressed, shame-prone, anxious, and judgment-sensitive, making them silent and vulnerable to illness.
These people work hard, lie often, and avoid situations that might reveal their secrets. They also regulate their emotions in dysfunctional ways, such as by suppressing them. The constant tension between wanting to reveal a secret and not revealing it alters the body’s stress response, which can lead to inflammation and other phenomena that lead to physical problems. Then some thrive on deception, avoiding the physical and emotional consequences of keeping secrets. For example, Machiavellian personality types are sophisticated manipulators. “For Machiavellians, the information you can use about others is valuable and you have to keep information about yourself because people can use it against you,” says Delroy Paulhus, an expert on the “dark triad” of narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic traits (he works to include sadists to make it a quadrilateral). Machiavellians are the Bernie Madoff type, intelligent and charismatic, and unlikely to be caught unless the global financial system collapses, says Paulhus. Madoff hurt many people, but at the same time, “he was loved by everyone who knew him.”
Can a liar have many people, some of whom are honest? Consider Charles Lindbergh, the respected aviator who had three secret families; Paulhus speculates that a combination of narcissism (“I deserve more!”) and Machiavellianism (the ability to manage logistics and people) enabled his behavior. Yet one of his daughters told the New York Times that she had come to believe that his relationships with his other wives and children were “real.” The feelings themselves were real.
Secrets in Therapy
Barry Farber, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has delved deeply into the subject of patients who keep secrets from their therapists. But isn’t therapy the only place where people can safely share hidden behaviors and feelings? “There’s a constant struggle between wanting to be known and get help on the one hand, and avoiding the shame of admitting parts of ourselves that we don’t like on the other,” Farber says. We simply can’t help but present ourselves in ways we think will make others see us better—even if that other person is a paid professional.
Farber’s research suggests that more than 90 percent of patients have lied to or withheld something important from their therapists, often. One of the biggest secrets that therapists keep from them is distress—patients don’t tell them how bad they are. And if they’re having suicidal thoughts, in particular, they fear that the therapist will overreact and send them to the hospital. A second area of concealment is feelings about the treatment itself. Patients may pretend that the treatment is more effective than they think, “which is why so many people stop treatment abruptly,” says Farber.
Although they may hint at it, patients significantly underestimate their use of drugs or alcohol. The final big topic, of course, is sex. “It’s not entirely true that patients don’t talk about sex,” says Farber. “The truth is that patients don’t talk about sex as much as they acknowledge that it’s important to talk about it.”
In Farber’s survey, between 5% and 25% of patients omitted one or more of these topics: important information about their sexual history, including past assaults; fantasies or desires; sexual problems; infidelity; the extent of their pornography obsession; and sexual feelings toward their therapist.
Withholding the word hinders the therapeutic process. For one thing, Farber says, “It affects how honest patients are about other parts of their lives that they share.” Concerns about couch confession are largely unfounded, he adds. “If you disclose something difficult, your therapist is more likely to respond appropriately, effectively, and ethically.”
